Bideford slipway, East-the-Water

Torridge District Council is the statutory harbour authority for the Port of Bideford, with byelaws for the estuary dating to 1894. The council describes its Torridge estuary slipways as serving small boats, canoes, paddleboards and similar craft alongside fishing boats, tugboats and yachts, and no byelaw restricting unpowered craft on this stretch has been found. Harbour users follow a voluntary code of conduct agreed between the council and the Harbour Users Group.

The estuary is strongly tidal: the council's own pilotage guidance warns that tidal streams and shifting banks mean moving any vessel here requires considerable caution, and pilotage is compulsory for vessels over 50 metres. The deep-water channel has migrated west across the river since the mid-1800s, so this east bank now dries to mud and sand at low water while the main channel runs closer to the town-quay side. Ships of up to 90 metres regularly call at Bideford carrying ball clay for export to Finland, Spain, France and Holland, and the Lundy ferry MS Oldenburg also works from the town quay.

Bideford Long Bridge, a Grade I listed structure of 24 arches of differing widths that reflect its earlier timber origins, crosses the river about 0.8km upstream. The A39's Torridge Bridge, a 650m concrete viaduct opened in 1987, crosses roughly the same distance downstream on the way to the open sea at Appledore.

The estuary here lies within the Taw–Torridge Estuary Site of Special Scientific Interest and the buffer zone of the North Devon Biosphere Reserve. Its mudflats and sandbanks support nationally important numbers of curlew, golden plover and lapwing, along with abundant redshank, dunlin and oystercatcher, so that the total number of waders present at any one time can reach over 20,000; a voluntary code promoted by the Biosphere aims to reduce disturbance to them.